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As you can see on this link, the US is looking to reinvigorate its depressed jobs market by allowing the Big 3 car makers to employ new workers for $14.00 per hour, whilst veteran workers earn twice that amount. Even at this rate, employers received 100,000 applications.

Australia has wage issues of its own. The mining boom (with all of its attached wage rise complications) has drawn some of the best talent to work in rural Australia, whilst sapping the balance of the economy of labour. Wages in many fields have risen, although manufacturing jobs have been steadily going by the wayside.

Instead of a rise in unemployment, all we are going to see is a shift in the patterns of employment. Mining is going to be the major beneficiary, yet wages will not shift at all, even after the influx of new miners.

The question still remains, of how someone earning $560.00 per week can afford to look after a family. I am not fully aware of the total cost of living in Michigan but I’m sure that making ends meet would be hard at that income level. Still, beggars can’t be choosers.

Well, All Torque Preston’s trusty old laptop whirred and fizzed its last noises last week, before keeling over and yelling “Enough!!”

Life’s Good, claimed the logo on the front of Ol’ Faithful, but life turned pretty ugly very quickly as we hurriedly hunted down our last backup dongle. Luckily, it was only from the previous day so there wasn’t too much that needed to be recovered.

Left – Greg at work on Ol’ Faithful. May he rest in peace.

Crisis management became the catchcry of the day. We organised for a new desktop to be built (something we had in the pipeline anyway, so we just had to bring it forward), whilst a reserve laptop was rushed into temporary service. Our new computer arrived this week and it is FANTASTIC! All of a sudden, our computing power has skyrocketed to today and has made our lives a lot more straightforward.

If there was a moral to this story, I would say that keeping up to date with technology may be expensive, but the cost of not doing so is frightening, especially when something goes wrong.

There is one key issue that many users of power transmission equipment have when detailing their requirements with us; underestimating the torque requirements of a particular drive.

Many is the time a customer will say “it is only going very slowly” without realising that this is how a lot of torque is generated. Most gear drives utilise a four pole electric motor (1400 RPM) on the input and reductions generate torque as a function of their ratio.

When converting motor design power for a particular job into the output torque, the following formula is used: Torque (Nm) = (Motor Power (kW) x 9550) / Speed (RPM of output shaft). As we can see, the denominator is speed, so the slower the unit is going, the less we divide by and the higher the torque value. In American terms, Torque (in lb-ft) = (Motor Power (HP) x 5252) / Speed (RPM).

Very large reductions will require a very large gearbox, usually with an electric motor that looks tiny in comparison and out of place.